In PHP 5.2.6 : I'm trying to replace any dot character found at the
start of a line with two dots.

Since I cannot find a way to make ^ match newlines within a string, I
am doing:

ereg_replace('(\r|\n)\.','\1..',"first line\r\n.\r\nsecond line");

This however still seems not to match - the dot is never replaced.

ereg family does not use the extended features of grep.

I also had problem where replacing whitespace using \s would replace
's' characters instead.